Thursday, May 05, 2005

Geobloggers - mixing Google Maps and Flickr

Upon arriving at Geobloggers.com you are greeted with the following tagline: "Mixing Google Maps & Flickr: 951 photos geotagged and counting."

Geobloggers provides the following instructions when posting photos to Flickr.com to be picked up by geobloggers:

1. Add three tags to your photo, "geo:lat=xx.xxxx", "geo:lon=xx.xxxx" and "geotagged", where xx.xxxx are the decimal format for it's lat and long position.

2. Example "geo:lat=53.013", "geo:lon=-2.1756" & "geotagged" Then;

* Fastest, in the description add a link to www.geobloggers.com (i.e. (geotagged). From the photos own page (not the photo stream) click the link. geobloggers will automagically look up the photo you just came from and search the tags for the lat and long. Note: If the link doesn't seem to work wait a couple of minutes and try again. Sometimes it takes a short while for the lon/lat tags to appear in the XML data I get back from the flickr API.

* Slower, just wait. geobloggers picks up the RSS stream for all public photos tagged as "geotagged". It does this once every 5 mins, but the RSS feed itself is updated far less often (as far as I can tell). As it only holds the last 10 pictures, it's possible it'll miss some this way, I'll wrangle around this in the future.

3. errr...

4. that's it.

or

1. If your camera records the GPS data in the Exif headers, tag your photo with "geocoded" and it'll be grabbed from the RSS feed

Here are some examples from the Geobloggers site which are linked through to Flickr.com:

This has some real potential to create some unique, amazing photo collections!